What Exactly is Accounting Subledger?
Whenever you are bringing in funds to your organization, you must be able to reconcile those donations, gifts, pledges, and more within your financing systems. As all fundraisers know, the job is far from over once a donor pledges a gift. Ensuring those gifts are received and tracked appropriately for both the fundraising and finance teams can mean double data entry and manual reconciliation processes.
Now, with Salesforce’s new Accounting Subledger solution, you’re able to connect those fundraising efforts with your accounting like never before. Through the automated preparation of your fundraising information, Accounting Subledger saves your organization time and reduces manual errors, giving finance easily-importable data.
How Does Accounting Subledger Work?
Salesforce created the Accounting Subledger solution to simplify packaging up fundraising data and transforming it into finance-friendly data.
Through the Subledger, your Opportunities/Payments/Allocations transform to become Ledger Entries that are Debit & Credit-friendly. This data all exists within Salesforce.
Once the data is summarized into the Ledger Entry records, a user can choose the right report (from a library of pre-defined reports) for their specific system to run.
The report data can then be exported into a CSV file and is ready for direct import into an accounting system.
Salesforce showcases its product in great detail here: Accounting Subledger Product Page
One of the greatest benefits of the Accounting Subledger is that, like everything built on the Salesforce platform, the solution does not force you to change your processes to fit the technology, just the opposite is true: the Account Subledger solution offers your organization an opportunity to evolve your process through technology and it does so without the risk of manual data manipulation.
Is the Accounting Subledger Right for Your Nonprofit?
If you or your organization are considering implementing the Accounting Subledger, make sure to bring your fundraisers and finance teams together and talk through some of these critical questions:
- What is our current process for ensuring finance has the data it needs from fundraising?
- Who is currently doing the work of transforming fundraising data to be finances-friendly?
- Does the current process work?
- How long does it take for someone, or multiple people, to complete?
- Is it scalable?
- How error-prone is it?
- How customized is our financial accounting system and would we expect the same level of detail to be captured in Salesforce?
- (Perhaps most importantly) What does the reconciliation process look like? How are adjustments, reversals, and write-offs handled? Would we want that process to be automated?
The Accounting Subledger is a phenomenal addition to the Salesforce platform and can be used with both the Nonprofit Cloud and Education Clouds. Ultimately, what the Accounting Subledger will do for organizations is save time and reduce the risk once incurred through manually sharing data between fundraising and finance teams and create greater transparency within the fundraising and accounting processes.
Want to learn more? We’d love to chat. Not only was Cloud for Good a participant in the Accounting Subledger pilot program, but we’re also one of the only Salesforce implementation partners to have experience implementing the solution as part of our client’s digital transformational strategy. You can also join our webinar, Bridging the Gap: Connecting Finance to Fundraising with Account Subledger, on July 23 @ 1:00 pm EDT. We’ll be joined by the Accounting Subledger Product Owner, Chris Clark, to talk about why this product is so important, how easy the Accounting Subledger is to use, and a roadmap for what’s upcoming with this amazing solution.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
